Band recording at Trypoul Studios

Band recording at Trypoul Recording Studios (Saterday, 15 January 2022)

Today I recorded a band (Recover) at Trypoul Recording Studios togehter with co-students Hendrikus Nijhof and Jeroen Wolff under guidance of Trypoul owner Dirk Joosten. We recorded two songs: River Deep Mountain High from (originally from Ike & Tina Turner but Recover played the GEE version) and I can’t stand the Rain (Tina Turner).

Preparation prior to the recording day

To prepare the recording session, we needed to think about the approach we would follow to record the band. For example, would we place the complete band be in the main recording hall, or would we place the horn section and the lead vocal in separate rooms. The advantage of the first approach is, obviously, that the musicians can see eachother, which can improve the performance. However, the drawback is the crosstalk between the microphones which will make mixing more troublesome.  We decided to place the horn section in the Stone Room and the lead vocal in the Vintage booth. In addition, we needed to decide on the microphones we wanted to use for the recording. Finally, we discussed our approach with Recover.

Recording at Trypoul

During the recording day we had in total 5 hours to prepare: discuss our microphone choices with Dirk (we made a few changes), setup the drumkit, setup the microphones, DI boxes, and headphone monitoring system, setting up the band, patching the microphones and DI boxes to the Neve 88RS mixing console  and Pro-Tools, doing a line check and setting up the mixing console, recording, and overdubs. Lots of work but in the end, thanks to the guidance and help of Dirk, we managed to record the two songs and had fun in the process.

Listening to the recordings

Back home, I had a quick listen at the recordings. These were quite good but not perfect. Some drum mic’s had too much crosstalk. On the other hand the crosstalk for the horns but also for the background vocals was quite low. We recorded each song several times but because we didn’t use a click track the recordings have (slightly) different tempo’s and are therefore difficult to combine. This is something to consider for a next recording session.

Mixing

Both songs need to be be mixed individually by me and my co-students. I will report on this at a later stage.

Again, we learned a lot. It was fun to do and we had a very nice day. Great hospitality from Dirk, his daughter (helping with setting up the drum kit), and partner. And, of course, go to work with Recover again….. but this time not as their keyboard player. Still great performance.

Dirk Joosten

Owner Trypoul Recording Studios